Browsing All Posts published on »April, 2012«

After last week’s post about not talking to the police, a reader wrote us to ask about identifying yourself to a police officer. It’s not a simple yes or no answer, and, since we love fan-mail so much, we turned the answer into a post. Here’s to you, Mr. H. Do you have to identify […]

The Department of Justice does not exactly have a rep on the interwebs for hosting awesome video content. Not surprisingly, this public service announcement was not actually created by DOJ. Good thing, too, because if DOJ ever creates a video I actually like, it’s gonna seriously mess with my current paradigm. Tribal justice remains hard […]

The relationship between crime and the media has never been great — and by “never been great” what we really mean is “news reporting about crime wildly misrepresents actual crime and disrupts the political process by misleading the general public, who, in turn, demand that elected officials act upon outrageously distorted beliefs about crime.” Check […]

You have to watch this video twice. The first time, you will be mesmerized by this law professor’s raw talent for averaging 22.6 words per second with an unmatched ability to simultaneously entertain, wave his hand around, chew gum, rub his belly, and pat the top of head without breathing. Okay, I exaggerated. But only […]

Stacy Knutson has reportedly worked for a small salary and tips at the Fryn’ Pan restaurant in Moorhead, Minnesota, for eighteen years. Eighteen years is an awfully long time. And waiting tables generates an awfully small income to help support a family of seven, including her husband and five children. Despite all this, Knutson is […]

A gun was used to murder my friend and classmate when I was in elementary school. That death haunted not only my childhood, but my college and adult years. In some ways, entering the criminal justice field as an adult was an attempt to resolve that powerful tragedy of my youth. I can still picture […]

Jury research is just not that impressive. Studies done by psychologists and others in the social sciences often rely on convenience samples of college students, sample sizes are often quite small, but most importantly? Juries just aren’t nearly as relevant as you might think. When the majority (read: 90-95%) of criminal cases are plea-bargained, it’s […]